First invented in 1998, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is a real-time communication technology based on core protocols and developed by the XMPP open source community. XMPP is used for various applications such as instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data. The XMPP Standards Foundation is an open standards development organization that defines open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication. Such applications are based on a decentralized infrastructure for internet communication.
Currently, two methods, unicast and broadcast are used to deliver content such as video and multimedia to consumers from content providers. Unicast, the predominant choice for communication and content delivery via the Internet, delivers the same data stream to each consumer. This results in particular content being potentially transmitted multiple times through the network. In terms of multimedia streams, the required network capacity is the number of consumers times the bit rate of the content, which creates a limit to the number of consumers that the system can support. Broadcast, the method used by cable companies to deliver TV stations, delivers all available content streams all the times. The required network capacity is the number of channels times the bit rate of the content, which creates a limit to the number of channels that the system can support assuming constant network capacity.